Manual mode at take-off?

Yesterday I arrived at one of my flying fields for some practice and found a young man trying (and mostly failing) to fly his 20" electric heli. He didn't have good control of the yaw so every time he took off the bird would flip around to nose-in and he'd get confused and drop it back into the grass. I introduced myself to his watchful mother and the young pilot and offered up some pointers which he immediately put to use. No bearing on my question, just setting the scene...

When I broke out my P2V he was fascinated and of course a crowd gathered immediately (About 1,500 feet. Yes it has a camera. Expensive. No you can't.) to watch it fly. Being slightly distracted I missed one critical step in my preflight check - confirming the position of S1 and S2 switches. It wasn't until i was airborne and in flight that I noticed my S1 was set to manual. Huh?

I have experience with other electric helis and am proficient in keeping squirrely things in the air but I have never flown a quad prior to PV2. Certainly not in manual mode with no assisted stabilization. I immediately flipped the switch up to GPS and felt no ill effects on flight. So here's my question - is manual mode not available at take-off if you power up the TX and the PV2 while S1 is set to manual? I don't see anything about this in the documentation. I have yet to experiment with Manual on the PV2 since I've read that its so unstable. Perhaps it was and I was instinctively correcting for it like I do with other helis? Not sure, so I thought I'd throw it to the collective brain here. Is manual mode disabled at lift-off or did I just get lucky? Can't say I'm excited to recreate my noob moment to test it. Any thoughts?

Yesterday I arrived at one of my flying fields for some practice and found a young man trying (and mostly failing) to fly his 20" electric heli. He didn't have good control of the yaw so every time he took off the bird would flip around to nose-in and he'd get confused and drop it back into the grass. I introduced myself to his watchful mother and the young pilot and offered up some pointers which he immediately put to use. No bearing on my question, just setting the scene...

When I broke out my P2V he was fascinated and of course a crowd gathered immediately (About 1,500 feet. Yes it has a camera. Expensive. No you can't.) to watch it fly. Being slightly distracted I missed one critical step in my preflight check - confirming the position of S1 and S2 switches. It wasn't until i was airborne and in flight that I noticed my S1 was set to manual. Huh?

I have experience with other electric helis and am proficient in keeping squirrely things in the air but I have never flown a quad prior to PV2. Certainly not in manual mode with no assisted stabilization. I immediately flipped the switch up to GPS and felt no ill effects on flight. So here's my question - is manual mode not available at take-off if you power up the TX and the PV2 while S1 is set to manual? I don't see anything about this in the documentation. I have yet to experiment with Manual on the PV2 since I've read that its so unstable. Perhaps it was and I was instinctively correcting for it like I do with other helis? Not sure, so I thought I'd throw it to the collective brain here. Is manual mode disabled at lift-off or did I just get lucky? Can't say I'm excited to recreate my noob moment to test it. Any thoughts?

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I think it's very important to take off in gps mode to set the starting point if you lose the signal and the safe mode will work...